re:paris prize

The Re:Paris Prize is a reimagining of Van Alen Institute’s Paris Prize, awarded 1904–97, which for a time provided winners a year-long scholarship to study at the famed École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Inverting the “Grand Tour” tradition, the Re:Paris Prize shifts focus away from Paris in favor of cities and communities across the global post-colonial landscape.

For the inaugural prize, Van Alen has partnered with the Pan African Biennale, the first continental platform dedicated to the built environment, architecture, and spatial practice conceived and led from Africa. The Biennale’s founding curator, architect Omar Degan, is instrumental in shaping the Re:Paris Prize, helping articulate its themes, supporting the selection and mentoring of awardees, and amplifying the Prize’s potential impact on the future of designing cities.

The Re:Paris Prize will be awarded to three designers passionate about civic design and citymaking — one based in the United States; the other two from the African Continent, selected from exhibiting designers at the 2026 Pan-African Biennale. The two Africa-based winners will be selected and announced at the Pan African Biennale in September 2026. The US-based winner will be selected in December 2026 and announced in January 2027.

Each winner will receive $35,000 to research how design plays a transformative role in Africa and the Black diaspora, in places once held to the periphery of architectural and urbanist discourse, but are now increasingly appreciated as sites of spatial intelligence, epistemic innovation, and future-making.

A select group of staff from Van Alen and Pan African Biennale staff will review submissions and refer up to 10 finalists to the Re:Paris Prize selection committee. The committee, composed of a multidisciplinary group of five leading designers drawn from Van Alen’s and the Pan African Biennale’s network, will meet on two separate dates to determine the three winners. To avoid any conflict of interest, any person who nominates a prize finalist will be excluded from the selection committee. 

The winners will collaborate over a period of 12 months, sharing learnings from the field with each other, and co-designing ways to connect their work to relevant audiences through exhibitions, lectures, and other public programming formats. In addition to traveling independently for their projects, winners will convene as a full cohort three times during the research period: the kickoff and closing for the program at Van Alen’s Brooklyn office, and again for a “midpoint” event in a city to be announced.

We seek accomplished, ambitious, resourceful designers with proposals that: 

• Require international travel to connect with experts and opportunities for impactful field research

• Move an important new concept or existing projects to the next phase of development 

• Meaningfully engage communities impacted by historical and ongoing harm in a spirit of cross-cultural collaboration and exchange 

• Help ideas scale up to achieve greater impact or connect with a wider audience

We seek proposals that address one or more of five critical themes in reparative and regenerative urbanism:

• Land Use, Planning, and Regenerative Development: How can new models of land use, planning and development repair blighted neighborhoods and promote broad-based prosperity? 

• Materials, Making, and Resilient Design: How the physical building blocks of cities can support climate action, circular economies, and waste reduction

• Data, Algorithms, and the Public Realm: How digital infrastructures reshape public spaces, civic life, and spatial perception

• Interdependent Ecosystems: How urban design supports environmental repair, ecological stewardship and resilience

• Cultural Hybridity: How can we recenter local, indigenous and underrepresented knowledge?